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I’ve been asked this provocative question three times in three weeks. Once I was presenting a workshop on how to teach college-bound high-schoolers to handle complex text on tests like the ACT. This group wanted to know if it mattered...

A colleague asked me about using e-books in high school science classes instead of textbooks. I like the idea that e-books might be more current and kids would likely read outside of class if they didn’t have to lug a huge book home. However, I remember reading something about the brain processing the reading of e-books differently than...

Hooray! Spring is on the way. Whether families are headed to the beach, camping, amusement parks or even a staycation, it’s a great time to practice using those reading accommodation tools with real-life reading opportunities. Using reading tools such as text-to-speech during fun, low stress,...

American-born Chinese Gene Yang sits down with Chinese-born American Katherine Paterson to talk about the books that most influenced them as readers and writers. Paterson — the child of Christian missionaries — spent her early years in Huai'an and Shanghai. Her first language was Chinese, but the books that she remembers most vividly from her childhood were the works of British writers such as...

October is Learning Disabilities (LD) Awareness Month, which means it is time to recognize individuals with learning disabilities and the educators who support learning differences. Since 1985, this month is used by organizations such as the...

A poster session at the 2016 UDL Symposium was brimming with free and low-cost assistive technology. Use these resources to immediately support teaching and learning with the Accessible Educational Materials (AEM/AIM) that reduce frustration for both vulnerable and variable able learners. Moreover, AEM is a necessity that enables so many learners to thrive when they have print...

Gene and his good friend and creative collaborator, Thien Pham (Level Up), just started a book club, inspired by their newfound love of YA romance novels. In their first book club get-together, they talk about Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, a love story of two young people from different worlds. Are Eleanor and Park are too young for "true love"? Would their relationship...

Snoopy, the world-famous beagle, aka The Flying Ace, returns to the big screen this fall in The Peanuts Movie from Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios. Meanwhile during September, he is also the Honorary Chair of "Library Sign Up Month."

The American Library Association holds this annual event to mark the start of the school year and to remind patrons that books are a...

This summer we traveled to France for a friend’s wedding and the Tour de France. It was a trip that included a long road trip with multiple stops. I thought a fun way to get the kids excited about the trip would be a map exercise: creating a visual itinerary to help the kids understand where we were going and what we’d be seeing.

Educators who hold to beliefs that audiobooks are cheating can have their say in their personal lives. At school, that point of view stands in the way of academic success for struggling readers for whom audiobooks and alternatives to print are a necessity.

Decode poorly, read slowly?

Students who decode poorly and read slowly should use audiobooks to access the curriculum. They also...

Pokémon GO, the mobile game for smartphones, is so popular that daily usage data from SimilarWeb show it beats popular services like Twitter, NetFlix, and Spotify. Now, librarians are getting in the game with book displays and more.

A wonderful website for parents, Understood.org, is busy sharing information on an array of topics related to students with learning and attention issues.

Parents and teachers, too

Teachers, administrators and related services personnel partially comprise the information stream. Safe to say that all members of a school team can benefit from the wealth of information offered on this...

TheSmithsonian's Learning Lab team members are in Denver, Colorado this week for the 2016 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. Staff members traveled to unveil more than one million digital resources that students can use to discover, create, and share.

Educators and students who are into maker spaces, project-based learning, and Universal...

All children stand to lose ground over the summer, especially students who are disadvantaged and those with disabilities. The apps that follow are chosen by experienced, discerning evaluators. Because they have passed muster they could be a summer best bet to:

Stop an academic slide over the school break
Maintain skills across the curriculum
Preview content for the next school year...

Bravo to native Virginian Cece Bell, a Newbery Honor Book winner and 2015 Children's Choice Debut Author finalist who created and illustrated El Deafo. She has crafted the 2016 official and ready-to-download bookmark for the 97th annual Children's Book Week 2016 that runs from May 2-8.

Want an abundance of apps including assistive technology to enrich learning skills for children from birth to age 8? They are flowing this week. Here's why!

Lots of learning

"The annual Week of the Young Child (WYOC) celebration from April 10-16, sponsored by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), focuses on the importance of an accessible, affordable...